Skip to main content

Singular Movie for the Singular Year

I’m Thinking of Ending Things begins normally enough.


As the film opens, Jessie Buckley plays a young woman on a date with Jake a guy she has been seeing for a few weeks. But, as her interior monologue informs us, she wants out. Or at least she thinks she does. Jake is nice and all, but he’s not really right. Or is he? She is, after all, on her way with him to meet his parents. That’s got to mean something, right?

But her discomfort with their relationship soon spills out into the audience. As Jake drives her through a snowstorm to get to the farm where his parents live, their conversations — touching on everything from physics to movies to poetry to Broadway (Jake has a special place in his heart for “Oklahoma!”) — feel oddly scripted, as if they’re parroting grad-school assertions that they think are what two intellectual people would say to each other in similar circumstances. There’s a palpable artificiality. Are they living their lives or those of others?


Of course, seeing as the trippy and fascinatingly dreamlike “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” is the work of director/writer Charlie Kaufman — the screenwriter for “Being John Malkovich” “Anomalisa” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” — the feeling that things aren’t quite what they seem is certainly justified. And things get even weirder when we get to the farm and meet the parents, and the very, very strange dog.


There’s a tension that snakes through “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” that hints that a horror movie may be in the offing. There is a faint whiff of Ari Aster’s “Hereditary” and not just because Collette is in both films.

But Kaufman is not interested in cheap-thrill scares, those that evaporate once the credits roll. Instead, Kaufman — working from a script based on the novel by Ian Reid — is more entranced by the more existential horror of time itself, and what it does to human bodies, minds, dreams and aspirations.


While “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” is deliberate in its pacing, Buckley and Plemons are compelling, even when everything around them becomes increasingly discomfiting. Even if you have no idea what’s going on, you can always hang on to that.



If nothing else, even the film’s detractors will have to admit that none of it is predictable. “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” is a very strange and singular work that seems just about right for a very strange and singular year. It’s a slow burn not for people who can’t take it slow.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Mysterious M

M = MSD, M = Mirpur (Beat Bangladesh) M = M Chinnaswamy (Beat West Indies) M = M A Cidambaram (Beat Ireland) M =Motera (Beat Australia) M =Mohali (Beat Pakistan) M =Mumbai ???? But  M = Mallinga M = Muralitharan M = Mendis M = Mahela M = Matthews  Mystery should unravel on April 02, 2011

Death Sentence...

Recently there was an article in Hindu http://orwell.ru/library/articles/hanging/english/e_hanging This article has  come up on the wake of giving mercy to the killers of Rajiv Gandhi. There has been huge row about forgiving those involved in it. It has been twenty years since Mr Gandhi died and more than 70 years since Mr Orwell wrote the article. Letting these people off the crime they did, seems to be logical amongst various set of society who thinks letting go the criminals is a way forward for an emerging society. Death sentence looks medieval or cruel.  But was the crime (murder) committed a civilized step ? A society that sentences killers to nothing worse than prison -- no matter how depraved the killing or how innocent the victim -- is a society that doesn't *really* think murder is so terrible.  When a killer is hanged till death, society is condemning his crime with a seriousness and intensity that no other punishment achieves. I still remember as a child th...

बस यूं ही -- (भाग दो)

हम रोये तो लगा जमाना रोता है सच बोले तो हर  रोज़ यहाँ एक नया फसाना होता है कहीं खनकते जाम खुशी के कहीं भूके पेट बेचारा सोता है दामन अपना खाली देख मत रो उतना ही मिलता है जितना तू बोता है